Violence and (Geek) Entertainment

[Valetudo]

Watch the car chases in Ronin. Those are great car chase scenes.

 

[overgeeked]

I recently read one of the new Conan books, and was struck by something similar. Conan takes beating after beating, but in between each he miraculously heals. He starts each phase of the fight as fresh as a daisy.

It annoyed me, because one thing I enjoy about sword & sorcery is the grittiness. But then I realised that I'm probably not the intended audience. The book was written for kids (millennials and younger, I expect) who grew up on flashy video games and action movies that are all about over-the-top action and, as the OP notes, no real damage or danger.

What’s the difference though? A line of description saying Conan’s hurt? Describing the fight slightly differently based on Conan’s injuries. That’s all Robert E. Howard did in the originals. The original yarns had Conan survive the unsurvivable just about every story. Get up and fight long after he should have been dead. At worst his ribs hurt or he limped or an eye was swollen shut.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Given that IT is specifically about a bunch of kids who experience horrors, and then the same characters as adults, carrying that trauma, dealing with the same horror all over again?

And what’s the point of the story? Entertainment. It doesn’t really have anything to say about the real world. He just wants us to look at pain, suffering and trauma and be entertained by it. That seems pretty pornographic to me.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Fiction focuses on a telling a story

Which is the biggest unreality of all. The real world doesn’t fit into nice neat narratives where things happen for a reason. Barry goes for a walk and a tree falls on them. The end.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

What’s the difference though? A line of description saying Conan’s hurt? Describing the fight slightly differently based on Conan’s injuries. That’s all Robert E. Howard did in the originals. The original yarns had Conan survive the unsurvivable just about every story. Get up and fight long after he should have been dead. At worst his ribs hurt or he limped or an eye was swollen shut.

And none of Conan’s injuries are ever life changing, which most of them should have been if we were being realistic. That is if he survived the infection in an age without antibiotics.

In the Hawkeye TV series Clint is dealing with the life changing injuries he has received through superheroing. Marvel is more realistic than Conan.

 

[Autumnal]

I’m not (yet) going to the extremes of some of my writer friends, reading wound manuals and the like, but I definitely prefer violence in my games to have consequences. Alongside that, I’ve become much more interested in adventures that have little to no violence. Give me a good chase scene, absolutely, but I just don’t want to play out a lot of violence in my games, particularly solo ones.

Like most generalizations, this isn’t absolute. There are times I strap on my grimdark and charge toward the grue. Then I am concerned to make the violence interesting and suitable.